


Kevin Vacit's Origin Story

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [71]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Adopted Children, Backstory, Canon Character of Color, Canon Compliant, Children, Fix-It, Gen, Male Character of Color, Orphans, Outlaws, POV Character of Color, Parental Death, Psi Corps, Rogue Telepaths, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-26 09:37:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12056229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: The fix-it fic explaining Kevin Vacit's backstory. I explain some of the things that canon leaves out.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	Kevin Vacit's Origin Story

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
>  _Behind the Gloves_ is an in-depth series exploring a different side of the Psi Corps from the one presented in canon. This collection of stories presents readers with history, context, and slices of the lives of relatable protagonists covering 150 years of canon history, from the inception of laws that segregated telepaths through the aftermath of the Telepath War. By providing readers with the "rest of the story," with a nuanced (and not "one-sided") presentation of facts and events, I demonstrate that canon is misleading, and the truth is not as it seems.
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!

Canon's a little vague on much of Kevin's backstory, especially on character motivations (which often make little sense), so I'm going to explain to you what I can, and then show in the next few chapters how all this ties in to later material.

The story starts in 2115, during the massacres of that time period. Kevin Vacit was four years old, living with his mother in a Zuni village in New Mexico. Kevin's father was white and his mother was Zuni - his father left his mother very early in Kevin's life, so he never knew his father. Kevin's mother, like Kevin, was telepathic. She was attacked by normals (race never specified) and badly injured - she managed to keep the attackers from hurting her son, escape with him, and hide in a cave nearby. Unfortunately, she never survived the night, dying while holding Kevin in her arms, and four-year-old Kevin was involuntarily pulled into a "deathbed scan" with her. He had a spirit vision in that moment which haunted him for the rest of his life, a vision to which he later attributed his unusual form of telepathy that made him undetectable on tests.

With his mother dead and father long gone, Kevin lived with other villagers and extended family for a short time, until he was spotted by the telepath outlaw Jack O'Hannlon, otherwise known as "Monkey". Monkey, himself a very strong telepath (probably P12 on the scales of later eras), was able to spot that the little boy was himself a very strong telepath - one of only a few people in Kevin's whole life who could feel it.

Monkey and a dozen or two other telepaths had set up a sort of _ad hoc_ commune in the area, working odd jobs and moving frequently, trying to avoid detection from Metasensory.

(Before this time, Monkey and the others had been running/living in some sort of "Neo-Mayan pagan cult" in Alaska for a few years, before normals showed up with guns and shut it down. Monkey and the other leaders of the cult had never even believed a single thing about the "religion" they were practicing... they just liked to be edgy outlaws with their own telepath commune deep in the jungle, supposedly practicing Mayan rituals, and claiming to be Mayan deities. This didn't last long. By the time they found Kevin, they'd given up all pretense of being a Neo-Mayan cult, and were just a rag-tag bunch of outlaw telepaths living under the radar. As Kevin says much later in life of the man who raised him, "Monkey, you don't care about anything as long as you can blow things up.")

Monkey finds Kevin. Somehow Monkey convinces the villagers to let him take the boy back to the commune - Kevin's too young to understand what's going on. There are a few other children at the commune (other orphans or abandoned telepath children), but mostly adults.

The other leader of the group (and Monkey's on and off lover), Desa Alexander, also known as Blood, can't feel Kevin as a telepath, and she argues with Monkey about it, who is adamant that the boy is one of them. Eventually she allows him to stay, even though Monkey's the only one who can feel the boy to be a telepath.

(Monkey and Blood, aka Jack and Desa, are also Natasha's great-grandparents. Natasha knows about her great-grandmother, but has no idea that Jack was her great-grandfather, because Desa died without telling anyone who the father of her daughter was, and apparently no one ever did a successful paternity test. In the Corps (or MRA back then), it wasn't really supposed to matter, anyway - children took the surnames of their mothers, and the paternal line is secondary.)

So Kevin grows up with a group of outlaws. At times they work legal jobs, but just as often they're engaged in illegal business of one kind or another. Monkey and Blood begin to fight, because he wants to remain an outlaw and fight the MRA, and she wants to join the MRA and work for them. So she leaves.

Kevin spends some time in school here and there, enrolled for just as long as they can come up with a cover story to explain his presence (usually as Monkey's nephew), but it never lasts long, because the group always packs up and moves again. He develops a passion for reading, and, being exceptionally brilliant, Kevin teaches himself everything he can. (Think Abraham Lincoln or Alexander Hamilton - he's that kind of self-taught genius.)

At fifteen, Kevin decides he's had enough of Monkey's outlaw lifestyle. His life with them is going nowhere, and has bigger plans. The more he reads about the outside world and the larger debate about telepaths in society, he realizes that he had a larger role to play than following Monkey in a life of random crime and blowing up the MRA.

Monkey, however, has pinned all his hopes for the future on young Kevin - he wants Kevin to succeed him some day as the head of the rogue "resistance" to the MRA, and Monkey, in his own weird way, actually loves Kevin as a son. Kevin, however, sees Monkey's "resistance" as little more than disorganized terrorism and random violence, mixed in with petty crime ("Send him out for groceries, and he ends up with every cop in town on his tail"), and he doesn't want that life. As Kevin sees it, Monkey only really cares about "blowing shit up," pretending he's living in "The Man Who Would Be King" and imagining himself the Monkey King of Chinese legend. Monkey even throws a fit if anyone calls him "Jack" -  he only lets people call him "Monkey."

Kevin doesn't see the point, so he packs up and leaves.

Monkey is devastated.

Kevin - who can pass as a normal, much to the jealousy of others in the commune - gets a full scholarship to ASU and majors in neurophysics, graduating in just three years. At eighteen he goes to Harvard, again on scholarship, for a master's degree in the same, and at twenty he enters Harvard Law School and graduates number one in his class. He then spends a year in Houston working for Ernesto Perez, Houston special attorney for metasensory evidence (more on this later), and applies for the position as Senator Crawford's personal aide - and gets the job a month shy of his twenty-fourth birthday.

He doesn't look back. It would be many more years since he would speak with Monkey again.


End file.
